Rapid-prototyping of embedded systems via reprogrammable devices

This paper describes a flexible board-level rapid-prototyping environment f or embedded control applications. The environment is based on an APTIX boar d populated by Xilinx FPGA devices, a 68HC11 emulator, and APTIX programmab le interconnect devices. Given a design consisting of logic and of software running on a micro-controller that implement a set of tasks, the prototype is obtained by programming the FPGA devices, the micro-controller emulator and the APTIX devices. This environment bring based on programmable device s offers the flexibility to perform engineering changes, the performance ne eded to validate complex systems and the hardware setup for held tests. The key point in our approach is the use of results of our previous research o n software and hardware synthesis as well as of some commercial tools to pr ovide the designer with fast programming data from a high-level description of the algorithms to be implemented. We demonstrate the effectiveness of t he approach by showing a close-to real-life example from the automotive wor ld.